Bombs kill 40 around Iraqi capital
City goes ahead with end of 10-year-old curfew, roadblocks
BAGHDAD — Baghdad’s decade-old nightly curfew ended after midnight, hours after bombs exploded in and around the Iraqi capital Saturday, killing at least 40 people in a stark warning of the dangers still ahead in a country under attack by the Islamic State.
The deadliest bombing happened in the capital’s New Baghdad neighborhood, where a suicide attacker detonated his explosives in a street filled with hardware stores and a restaurant, killing 22 people, police said.
“The restaurant was full of young people, children and women when the suicide bomber blew himself up,” witness Mohamed Saeed said. “Many got killed.”
The Islamic State later claimed the attack, saying their bomber targeted Shiites, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a U.S.-based terrorism monitor. The militants now hold a third of both Iraq and neighboring Syria in their self-declared caliphate.
A second attack happened in central Baghdad’s popular Shorja market, where two bombs some 25 yards apart exploded, killing at least 11 people, police said. Another bombing at the Abu Cheer outdoor market in southwestern Baghdad killed at least four people, police said.
In Tarmiyah, a Sunni town 30 miles north of Baghdad, a bomb blast killed at least three soldiers in a passing convoy, authorities said.
Hospital officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to brief journalists. No group claimed the other attacks.
With the attacks Saturday, at least 62 people have been killed in Baghdad over the past 10 days.
Despite the bombings, the government went ahead with its plans to lift the nightly midnight-to-5 a.m. curfew this morning. The curfew largely had been in place since 2004, in response to the growing sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion a year earlier.
A crowd of men, women and children played music and waved Iraqi flags early this morning as they gathered despite a heavy security presence in central Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to celebrate the curfew’s end. Elsewhere, small groups of young men rode around the capital on motorcycles and in cars, cheering and waving Iraqi flags.
There was no immediate comment Saturday from Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who announced the end of the curfew Thursday by decree. He also ordered that streets, long blocked off for security reasons, reopen for traffic and pedestrians.
Iraqi officials have repeatedly said that the capital is secure, despite Sunni militant groups occasionally attacking Baghdad’s Shiite-majority neighborhoods.
There had been signs in recent months that the threats to Baghdad were subsiding. As the government strengthened its security presence in the capital to repel any offensive by the militants, there were fewer of the daily bombings that had become a hallmark of life in the city, residents said.